If you're on this page you're probably having some sort of issue with your website loading slowly.

I'm sure you're well aware and I don't even need to tell you, if a website is slow to load you'll pretty quickly lose patience and go elsewhere. Your own website is no different.

Your Google rankings, your Adwords and Facebook ads, and all the leads that come through your website are tied to the speed and user experience of your website.

If your site is slow to load it annoys prospects and even your existing customers. Google doesn't like slow websites and have publicly stated that slow websites won't rank as high in the search results. Our experience working with clients on their SEO has confirmed this too.

It's hard to disagree with the fact that a slow loading website has a huge negative impact on the overall performance of your business and your bottom line.

Fortunately, it’s usually a quick fix if you know what you’re looking for.

Customer Results

Typically most of our customers that purchase our standard speedfix service will see the load time of their site drop to somewhere between the 1-2 second mark. Most start at somewhere between 5-10 seconds, often more.

Our business speedfix has a load speed target of under 1 second includes migration to a Vultr VPS host - for most sites VPS hosting costs are somewhere between $11-$23/month.

As a general rule, between 1-3 seconds is where you need to be in terms of acceptable load times and under 1 second is that magical threshold where the page load feels almost instant. Anything over 5 seconds is going start to hurt your Google rankings and conversion rate (sales, enquiries, phone calls, bookings and so forth).

With every site we work on, we do before and after speed tests with the website speed test tool from Pingdom. Below are some recent results our customers have seen.

The Pingdom tester is completely free and takes less than 60 seconds, head to tools.pingdom.com and try it for yourself (do 2-3 tests to get an accurate average load speed).

Just under one second for this blog hosted on the entry level Siteground hosting plan. Pretty fast for what would be considered cheap hosting.

A great result here for a real estate broker with a fairly image heavy site.

This site is running Woocommerce which can be very resource hungry but still a great result.

Roughly 700ms for this site. It's using a third party landing page tool, Leadpages which is why it's performance grade isn't an A or B but it still sees sub 1-second loads.

How does the WP Speed Fix Service work?

We’ve helped thousands of businesses speed up their WordPress websites, typically there are 3 stages to a speed fix job once you complete your order:

Stage 1 - Information Gathering & Diagnosis of the Root Cause

Before we start we need more specific information on the exact problem you're having and need to get some logons from you too.

Once we have access to your site we work through an extensive checklist to uncover the underlying cause of your website's slow time. There's usually one or two specific reasons why your site is running so slow.

Usually we'll need an administrator level WordPress logon and FTP or Cpanel access.

Stage 2 - Fix the Root Cause of The Problem

Once we've identified the root cause of the problem we can then fix it! Quite often we can find the problem and fix it in less than 24 hours.

Once we've fixed the cause of the slowness we can then focus on making your site as fast as reasonably possible.

In this final stage we'll reconfigure your WordPress settings to improve your image size and compression, optimize your caching and tweak your database for maximum speed. These incremental gains can have a surprising impact on load speed.

For most websites we also recommend using Cloudflare. It's a website acceleration service and content delivery network with 100s of servers worldwide. This means that no matter where in the world your customers access your site, they will always get the fastest possible load times.

This is an optional part of the WP Speed Fix, but it's highly recommended as it can reduce the remaining load time by up to another 50% AND for the majority of sites we work on, the free plan is all you need.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Long Does The WP Speed Fix Take?

Once we have all the information we need, it usually takes 3-5 business days for us to work through the entire process but often we’ll diagnose and fix the root cause of your speed problems within 24 hours.

How Much Faster Will My Site Be?

On good quality hosting your site load time will sit in the 1 to 3 second range once our work is complete (most sites we work on start with a load time of over 10 seconds).

What If Something Breaks During The Process?

We always do a complete back-up of your website before we get to work using backup from Blogvault and major changes with potential downtime risks will be discussed with you before they happen.

Pingdom gives us the actual load speed which is what we're focussed on. Many other speed tools spit out a bunch of technical recommendations many of which have very little impact on speed at all.

After working with thousands of sites we've found Pingdom is the most accurate measure of speed and allows us to test speed from multiple geographic locations which gives us a better picture of how your website is performing in the real world.

We don't use Google Pagespeed Insights as it doesn't actually measure site speed!

It checks your site against a checklist of technical best practices doesn't measure the real world speed of the website and ultimately that's what we really care about. It's actually possible to get a very high score in Pagespeed Insights, 90/100 or above, and still have a very slow loading site.

Pagespeed Insights also completely ignores critically important elements like geographic location, DNS hosting speed and reliability, content delivery networks and often spits out a bunch of recommendations that at best are marginal speed improvements and at worst a complete waste of time.

Probably, it depends how many sites you have in your network. We count
each site on your network as a standalone site so you'll need to
purchase a Speed Fix service for each site you want fixed. Some of the
changes we make as part of our speed optimizations will have an impact
on your entire network (a positive impact).

If you have a question about your multisite environment, shoot us an
email at questions@wpspeedfix.com and we can discuss in more detail.

If you're using Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator, A Small Orange or any
other EIG owned company you'll probably need to move to get your site
loading super fast. The only way cheap companies make any money on those
$3-5/month hosting plans is to stack 10,000 other websites on the same
server and run the server as hard as possible.

We find that we can get sites running on these services down to a
passable 3-5 second load time BUT the site will struggle to handle more
than a handful of simultaneous users at a time.

When it comes to hosting you get what you pay for - it's unreasonable to
expect a high quality service when you pay more for a coffee than you do
for an entire month of hosting or 1-2 clicks on your Adwords or Facebook
ads.

On high quality hosting, with a well built website theme you can expect a well built site to load in 1-1.5 seconds in the country where it's hosted.

For your overseas visitors, expect to see an additional 0.5-1 second additional load time for them. We recommend all sites use Cloudflare as this will help speed up the site for your overseas visitors quite significantly.

To get below that magical 1 second mark most sites need to start looking at removing tracking codes, plugins and externally hosted elements like Facebook and Twitter social widgets and like boxes, and Youtube videos.

Generally we don't have any control over what these third party elements do so if speed is your number 1 priority than reducing the number of these elements on your site is critical - we can advise on the best course of action here and often there are things that can be done to reduce the impact these elements have on load speed.

A good example here is removing the news feed from your Twitter and Facebook social widgets as these load an extremely large number of elements.

Over time many sites end up with a huge amount of analytics, tracking and remarketing codes embedded in the site and often many aren't being used. Removing the codes that aren't being used will often improve load time by half a second.

One other common problem we come across is video backgrounds - while these might look great they often are adding 5-10mb of bloat to the page size, a lot to download on a slow internet connection!

It's important to recognize that there will always be a tradeoff between site speed and what works from a sales and marketing perspective. For example, removing all Youtube video embeds from a page will absolutely speed it up but then it's going to perform as well from a sales and marketing perspective.

Yes, occasionally we get a site that we can’t fix. Usually the site has one of the issues listed below. In many cases we can work with you to resolve the issue. Most often the issue is related to the hosting the site is sitting on and in that case we can advise what needs to be done to resolve the problem and can migrate the site for you.

If we hit a major roadblock after you order that means we can't speed up your site we're happy give you a refund on your service.

It’s running on a Windows server.

While WordPress can run on Windows it’s designed to run on a Linux or LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) system which means you’ll never get a Windows server to perform as well as a LAMP setup. If site speed matters to you the site should not be running on a Windows server.

It's running on a complex WordPress Multisite setup

WordPress Multisite isn’t the best for performance, especially if you’re running a Multisite setup with a huge number of plugins or large number of sites. Multisite is often more convenient but the tradeoff is flexibility and sometimes performance.

The site is running on a VPS and the VPS has issues

Fixing VPS and server issues is outside the scope of what we do. The speed of your WordPress site is limited by how well the server is configured and most cheap VPS setups are poorly configured. Unless you have a specific reason to use a VPS, a managed WordPress host is often a better option because the server has been configured and tuned specifically for WordPress.

The hosting plan is poor quality

Your site is not going to perform if you’re on bargain basement hosting. There’s no way around this, cheap hosting is poor quality, ultimately you get what you pay for. As part of our service we can migrate you to a better quality host.

You have too much traffic for your hosting plan

Your hosting plan needs to be matched well to the level of traffic your site is getting. If you're getting 5000 visits a day you're going to need to be on a higher grade hosting plan that a site that gets 50 visits a day. Using tools like Cloudflare will dramatically improve performance for high traffic sites but at the end of the day your site speed is limited by the performance cap on your hosting. In cases like this quite often the solution is to move up to the next level hosting plan.

The IT department wants to host the site internally

IT departments are generally not commercially motivated and aren’t focussed on what’s best for business - after all, if things run smoothly they have nothing to do, if they have nothing to do then they don't have a job. Often an internal IT department will want to host the site internally rather than using a dedicated WordPress host that can do a far better job. If your site is hosted on internal IT infrastructure then we might be limited in how we can help.

Your site has custom dev work done or is running an obscure or poor quality plugin

Occasionally we come across a site that has had custom development work done that is very poor quality or is running a WordPress plugin that conflicts with other plugins or is simply just rubbish. Most often in these cases the plugin or development work is trying to do something WordPress was not designed to do and it's breaking the site or causing performance issues.

We have over 100 steps in our process so it’s impractical to give you finite detail on everything we do.

Generally the first step in our process is to identify the key problems that are slowing your site down, fix them and then work on general best practices. We’ll explain what these problems are and give you an explanation of why they’re problematic as well as provide before and after speed reports.

More broadly, here are the things we do:

WordPress Best Practices Review & Optimization
Most sites we work on have configuration errors or problems simply because the sites have been worked on by several people over time. We review your entire site and hosting configuration and ensure it’s configured in a best practices fashion.

Browser & Page Caching Configuration & Tuning
Caching is one of biggest improvements you can make to your WordPress site speed. Caching setup is a lot more complex than simply installing a caching plugin and turning everything on.

Each site is different and as such caching needs to be customized specifically to each site. On top of that, often caching settings are counter intuitive and on some hosts turning on things like Database Caching will actually slow your site down.

You’ll also find that many of the improvements that speed test tools on the web recommend such as removing query strings from static elements can actually create problems.

Database Optimization & Cleanup
If your site has been around for a while there may be garbage in the database that is slowing it down. For example, expired transients on Woocommerce sites can be a huge problem.

As part of our service we cleanup and optimize your database to ensure it’s running as fast as possible.

Anti-Heartbeat Setup
Especially for larger sites or sites where a lot of users are logged into at once, the WordPress Heartbeat can create problems. We reconfigure your heartbeat settings to ensure that this doesn’t become a problem for your site.

HTAccess File Optimization
HTAccess is one of your web server’s key configuration files and it often contains code that is slowing you down or causing problems in some way. We review your HTAccess configuration and ensure that it’s configured in a best practices format.

404 & Bad Request Review & Repair
It’s not unusual to find spelling errors in code or some other issue that is causing images or break or bad requests to your server. We review all elements that you site loads to ensure they’re not timing out or resulting in a 404 error.

Plugin Review & Pruning
Duplicated and outdated plugins are a huge problem when it comes to WordPress speed. Often this is something as simple as having multiple SEO plugins installed which is bad for both speed AND your Google rankings.

We review all your plugin to make sure they’re actually all required or being used, that none are providing duplicate functionality or causing conflicts somewhere in your site.

Server Compression Tuning
Many website servers don’t have compression turned on by default. We make sure your server compression settings are tuned for maximum performance.

Before and After Reports
We all the work we do we take before and after speed snapshots so we can show you exactly what improvements to site speed have been achieved.

Post Speed Fix Site Backup Provided
Once we’re finished we give you a full backup of your site via Dropbox. What we’ve found after working with 1000s of customers is that most don’t actually have a backup of there site at all!

Many of the changes we make are to the site configuration itself so it’s important you have an updated backup copy of your site stored somewhere.

We use Blogvault to backup our customer websites and take daily backups of your site while we’re working on it.

Image Optimization & Compression
Images are usually the largest component or your website and by using lossless compression we can often significantly reduce the size of your image files without any difference to the quality.

We losslessly compress all images on your site and will also resize images where appropriate.

Content Delivery Network Setup (optional, powered by Cloudflare)
Cloudflare.com is a fantastic service and we recommend it to all customers (the free service is all you need).

Cloudflare speeds up your DNS hosting (very commonly overlooked when it comes to speed), provides a content delivery network and several other acceleration features that no other provider or plugin offers.

HTTPS - on our Business service
The entire web is moving to HTTPS and it’s a good thing too. HTTPS ensures all data transmitted between your website and your visitors is encrypted.

When your site runs in HTTPS web browsers will use the newer HTTP2 protocol which requires less connections to the server and overall improves the render and load speed of your site.

With our WP Speed Fix Business service we migrate your site to HTTPS using either the free Letsencrypt.org service (if your host supports it) or we’ll provide a Comodo SSL cert for you.

As well as speed up your site, Google have stated that encrypted sites running in HTTPS will get a slight rankings boost.

PHP7 upgrade (if compatible)
PHP7 is the latest version of PHP and is 2-3x faster than PHP5.X which is the version of PHP your website is probably running (there’s no PHP6). This translates to approximately 0.5 seconds faster load time which is great for getting under that 1 second total load.

Not all web hosts offer PHP7 yet and not all website themes and plugins support.

How To Get Started:

Question before getting started? Try the live chat in the bottom right hand corner of the page or email questions@wpspeedfix.com - we'll usually get back to you in less than 24 hours

Ready to get started? Here's the next steps...

Step 1 - Choose which option you want from the table below and hit the Order Now button. Our Business plan includes implementation of HTTPS which makes your site even faster (via HTTP2 protocol) and improves your SEO

Step 2 - Once the checkout process is complete you'll receive an email with the list of logons we need and some questions about the specific problem you're having

Step 3 - Reply to that email with as much detail possible (the email goes into our job system)

Step 4 - Once we get your reply one of the team will do an initial assessment on your site and maybe have further questions for you

Step 5 - We fix your speed problems and optimize your site so it's running as fast as possible!

Prices in $USD
All payments are processed securely on our SSL encrypted site.
We accept Paypal, Visa, Mastercard & Amex (processed by Stripe).
GST inclusive for for Australian customers, GST does not apply to customers outside Australia.

"The WPSpeedFix team transitioned my website from slow response times and glitchy backend to a super-fast, highly responsive, glitch free, and very reliable site. My productivity has significantly improved because I'm not constantly waiting on my backend to process requests. My conversions have increased because my end-users are experiencing an almost instant load time. I run a WooCommerce based WP site and these guys knew every inch of it, guided me along every step of the way, were courteous and highly responsive, and valued my needs by addressing every single one of them. I HIGHLY recommend WPSpeedFix."

100% Money Back Guarantee

We will solve you WordPress speed problems, or we'll give you your money back. Most clients see a drop from 10+ seconds in load time to under 3 seconds. We'll make all the possible adjustments to make your site is as fast as possible — we guarantee it.